About

Team size: 53, with additional support from HSBC group legal teams and contractors and secondees

What are the most important transactions, litigations or other major projects that you have been involved in during the last year?

2020 saw the HSBC UK legal team provide critical legal support in advising on and producing the documentation necessary to enable the bank to offer the various government Covid-19 schemes to existing and new customers, as well as enabling payment flexibility for customers holding retail and commercial products.

The government schemes consisted of: the Bounce Back Loan Scheme; Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme; the Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme; and the Recovery Loan Scheme. This resulted in over 250,000 government loans being approved in total across the schemes equating to over twelve billion pounds of lending (the equivalent of ten years of SME lending in a few months).

In addition to the Covid-19 work and providing legal advice on HSBC UK’s products and services for its 15 million customers across its four brands, over the past twelve months, the HSBC UK legal team also worked extensively on key bank wide projects. These projects included the LIBOR transition, which enabled customers to amend their LIBOR facilities to new risk free rates. There was also the creation of the Business Banking Resolution Service which is a non-profit organisation set up to resolve disputes between eligible larger SMEs and participating banks. Another project was the formation of a stand-alone London listed regulated covered bond programme for HSBC UK. We also implemented changes required by PSD2 for e-commerce card transactions and the ongoing requirements to mobilise Open Banking.

There have been a number of legislative changes in response to Covid-19. Have these benefited your company or had any other interesting effects?

In addition to advising on and implementing the lending and payment holiday support we provided customers during the pandemic, Covid-19 has driven increased digital ways of working as well as reinforcing the bank’s flexible working ethos. For instance, we accelerated the roll out of legal solutions for electronic signing, witnessing and receipt of independent legal advice to enable customers to take advantage of schemes and products on offer.

Like many other companies, during the pandemic all members of the HSBC UK legal team worked remotely. We encourage team heads to increase the frequency of virtual team meetings and I started weekly all team “huddles” to enable every team member to hear directly from me. As a result, my sense is that as a team we are closer and have a better understanding of individual’s home lives and interests.

What were the main difficulties your company faced during the initial Covid lockdown?

The lending schemes introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a significantly increased workload for the legal function in addition to BAU work. This was coupled with the fact that a large number of the team have children under the age of five, who therefore were overseeing home schooling in addition to their work for HSBC UK.

Working from home for such a long period of time created mental and wellbeing issues. We have been able to leverage bank wide and global function initiatives. For instance across HSBC UK we hold an annual wellbeing month in May and employees have been given an extra day off as a ‘wellbeing day’. Additionally, across the global legal function, we are encouraging everyone to identify ‘One Small Change’ that will make a material impact to each person and to follow to our global functional “Healthy Workplace Principles”.

Within the HSBC UK legal team we have held wellbeing sessions hosted by a doctor. We have encouraged teams to shorten the duration of calls to allow time to take breaks between meetings. I try to have at least one audio call a day to allow me the opportunity to get outdoors more and move around.

Did the Brexit deal reached at the end of 2020 give you and your business greater clarity for the future?

We welcomed the successful conclusion of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU as the deal avoided costly tariffs and quotas for UK goods. However, many of our clients had very little time to prepare and are still adapting to the new customs regime, as are our clients who provide services in the EU.

Are there any other of your achievements over the past 18 months that you’d like to mention?

The last twelve months have seen increasing focus on digitising our products and services. The HSBC UK legal team supported the launch of Kinetic, our new digital banking offering to UK business customers, with over 10,000 customers being on-boarded as of the end June 2021. We also supported the launch of Global Wallet in the UK allowing our global customers to transact internationally through multi-currency wallets.

We have also led an initiative to simplify the approach to our documents. For instance, we have refreshed our business banking documentation to use a new framework approach which will also have the result of saving ten football fields of paper annually.

Finally, the legal team continues to champion the bank’s drive to support the most vulnerable in society. We were a core part of a bank wide project which created the “Survivor” bank to support survivors of Modern Slavery in their efforts to be re-integrated into society and to gain access to banking.

The team also advised on the bank’s “No Fixed Address” service where people without a fixed address can open a bank account. This enables customers to receive benefits and a salary. It serves as an important building block for financial independence and security.